Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
First: The Setup
I hear tell that if a writer wants to write, the first thing she needs to do is write. And that requires something to write with. Something to write on. Seat in chair. Writing pants on. And at least a little bit of time to herself.
I can tell you that none of this is easy but I’m happy, actually really happy, to bring you along for a little spin with me as dig into a couple of hours on my own.
I’m a writer who wants to write. So I show up for this event on Eventbrite.
Wide Open Writing First Sunday with Nancy Coleman
Author of
Wide Open Writing: Embrace Your Creative Genius
November 7, 2021
https://wideopenwriting.com/wow-first-sunday
I have my favorite jeans on , my writing pants – not too loose, not too tight, soft and thunked into place. I have coffee. I have a new laptop that I like how my fingers feel on the keys. I’m nervous. All sorts of reasons and none of them worth mentioning here.
Two o’clock comes and Nancy Coleman appears in the Zoom screen:
“We write with our bodies and we write from our bodies,” she says. And she continues.
“Matter of fact, try this”, she says. “ Try finishing these sentences, the first thing that pops into your mind. Don’t think on it too hard.”
My body feels like a…
My body sounds like a…
My body looks like a…
My body tastes like a…
My body smells like a…
“And now,” she instructs those of us that have not suddenly needed to sort our spice cabinet, “take the answers that stand out to you, either because they’re just fun or because they seem intriguing to you, and write for 20 minutes, write a story where they meet somehow, as characters or as events. As themes. See what comes out.”
Second: This is the story that came out
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
I’m singing this now, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.
I fucking love that song. I know that some of it is Lucinda Williams who I also fucking love but at least as much of it is just how clear and strong that image comes through to me. Reminds me of the power of words. The power of writing. And my power to make noise, move around, come and go. Invent. Make shit up and tell the truth. Mix them together – two truths and a lie – and see what comes out of it. Making it Up to Make it Real. Sing it, Mama.
My life is, at least some of the time, a mystery to me. I know some things like I grew up in New England and I’ve always been strong for a girl, even one that grew up in New England. I know that I like oatmeal with nuts and fruit on it and that I drink enough coffee that I might even smell like it. I know that I’m curious about many things but most often that curiosity has to do with how things work and why do we do what we do.
And what the hell is going to happen when we die. I’m curious about that too. Not enough to hasten the research but I do spend time imagining being dead. I had a chance to get close to it but the information I’ve held onto hasn’t made anything clearer as much as it whets my appetite for more.
I may have died a little bit when I wrecked my motorcycle and the option to keep going in that direction might have been a choice that was available to me. I don’t know if this is true, but I have some images, pictures in my mind and sounds, even a smell of gasoline and tar mixed with the leather of my favorite jacket that has gone missing ever since. The smell is deep in my memory, so deep that I can’t smell anything since.
I don’t taste or smell since the wreck and maybe there’s a reason like my mind is taken up with the smell and taste of being on the edge of the dying cliff. I don’t know that my answer was a definitive yes to life, but I am here and my taster and smeller aren’t. They seem to have been left in a puddle of gasoline and leather and skin on the sun baked tar of Pleasant Pond Road.
They scooped me up and piled me into the ambulance, maybe even left the smells there not thinking they’d be needed down the road. I wouldn’t have thought of it either had I been more aware. I’d have said, “don’t forget my jacket. It’s my favorite. My daughter gave it to me and her friend gave it to her. It’s one of those kinds of jackets.” But I wasn’t really there, and it seems the crew that was doing the scooping had the mess of me on their minds, so I got to the hospital and my jacket didn’t, nor did smelling and tasting.
I was in the hospital quite a while, weeks and months as I remember it. Lots of moaning when they rolled me and smiling afterwards so they wouldn’t think I was a wimp. I needed them to like me so they’d help me, I thought, and I knew I needed help. They gave and I groaned. They gave and I thanked. They gave and I got better, better enough to go home and start all over again with my own personal team of care givers. And we gave and groaned and thanked over and over again. I have much to be thankful for.
And I don’t know if I can have it all – the living rather than being dead and also to be able to taste and smell the life I have. I don’t know how much aplenty one New England girl is allowed to have. I hear those goddam car wheels on the gravel sometimes only now, when I hear them, it’s more like a leather jacketed body dragging along the gravel road. I still love the song but I love it different now. I think that’s how life is – we come equipped with memory magnets and when something comes in the vicinity of one of them, it gets sucked into place even if it’s not exactly what you were hoping for. Magnets can find your car keys in the beach sand but they also grab ahold of beer can tops. Treasures and trash. It can all look the same when it first comes up out of the ground.
Now when I hear the song I think, what else am I supposed to do here. I ask questions that I’m the only one that can answer them, but the answers have not come clear. Did I do enough yet? Can I rest now? Do I have to write or do I want to write? Or is that not really the question after all?
See, this is how it often goes. I can start out singing Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and before I know it, I am questioning the meaning of existence. That’s writing for you. At least for me.
Writing is so weird. I fucking love that too.
Third: So now to the helpful hints part of this blog
I reflect on this write, this chance to be in my pants in my seat, by myself. I recall an episode of a morning newsletter that I read, The SlowDown with Ada Limon. (or if I’m really slowing down, I listen to the podcast)
She said “sometimes I tell my students to do a writing exercise that’s just something on their desk. An object they’ve had with them for a while, a photograph, a stone from the ocean, a shell. I tell them just to explore it, interrogate it, just turn it over in your head and see what might happen.
And the most amazing thing happens: they really find they love those objects and can write about them for a long time. That they carried that black stone home from a day with their father just weeks before he died, that the small elephant was a gift from a friend on a day of heartbreak.
We start talking about those objects and soon it feels like our whole life is full of small stories to be grateful for. So many small things we pass all the time without holding them up to the light.”
I’m hearing you on this Ada. I want to feel the small stories, see them in the light. I hope to smell them and taste them again too. Not just Car Wheels on a Gravel Road but fresh rosemary on a Tuscan hillside. I’d be willing to go back and sweep up the scents and smells I left behind at the corner of Pleasant Point Road and Woodside Road if I could have the taste of a buttery croissant, they sell at the farmer’s market I was headed to there on Saturday.
I know we don’t really get to make deals. Or actually, we can make them but that doesn’t mean that the administration will take our application seriously. And even if it’s taken seriously, that doesn’t guarantee our request will be granted. Because it turns out that it’s a request rather than an edict.
But the likelihood increases if we ask just as the likelihood of us writing something is bolstered if we show up, ass in pants, pants in chair. And we give ourselves a little time to reflect on the small things. Sometimes it’s the big things that show up.
And then about the author:
Dulcie Witman is a writer living in Mid-Coast Maine, where she’s made her home and her therapy practice for the past 35 years. She is the co-founder of Wide Open Writing along with several other businesses - a chicken ranch and a restaurant, a painting company, and a landscaping company. She’s wall papered hotels and run them, renovated houses and sold real estate. You could say she’s researched the working world and found writing to be one endeavor that she can do without having to work her way up, though she did get her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College as a 60-year old.
Dulcie is a founding editor of Minerva Rising, https://minervarising.com/, a women’s literary journal, and has had work published in The Pitkin Review, https://thepitkinreview.com/, Rawboned https://rawboneddotorg.wordpress.com/, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing in Eindhoven, Netherlands with Watershed at their summer program, Camp Cushy. She completed a novel, Crooked Love, which is currently under consideration for publication and is working on a professional memoir, Confessions of a Therapist. She believes sharing creative space gives power to the connections that fuel the creative process - giving life to something that wasn’t there before.
She splits her time now between the coast of Maine and the desert of Arizona and she travels for writing retreats in between. You can find more of her musings on her website at www.dulciewitman.com.
Wide Open Writing
“We believe that getting away and connecting to nature and ourselves is central to the creative process. In this place of respite, we find our deeper truths. We purposely choose evocative settings where your adventurous spirit can come out to play with curiosity and wonder. Whether it’s desert or mountains, tropics or tundra, there’s always something sparkly to be discovered.”
WOW First Sunday
WHEN: The first Sunday of every month (unless otherwise stated on Our Calendar)
NEXT MEETING: December 5, 2021
TIME: 2pm — 4 pm EST
GUEST HOST: Emily Shearer will be coming at us with a whole new workshop about Making It Up. We’re all writers. For us, making it up is no big deal. It’s what we do. We create worlds on the page. So, what’s different about this WOW Writes Together afternoon? Emily will give you prompts and tricks for getting into that imaginative space. Sign up below. You don’t want to miss this!
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